[Jun8]

Ohboyohboyohboy, it seems I dodged bullet with an idea that I had 5-6 years ago that was very similar to this guy's: My idea was to sit beside a sign that said something along the lines of "Celebrate yourself Through Poetry" in the morning in downtown Chicago in front of a large office building. People going in would commission a poem in the morning, I would finish it and write it in calligraphy on a nice piece of paper by 4pm for a fixed cost, say $20. They would either buy or not buy the poem after I show it to them. A poor person's Francois Villon, if you will.

I've never mentioned this to anyone other than my wife (who used to work in that building) and she laughed her head off. Now that I write it, I feel like I might do this in the future. What do you think, would you buy such a thing for $20-$30 a piece? OTOH, I've gotta admit: I think most of the customers would be young women, so that would make me seem more of an object of ridicule / creep than this guy. Still ...

EDIT: OK, now that I've read my entry I feel like I have to admit something that makes the above proposition more insane or interesting, depending on your POV: I cannot write poetry, like not at all! My proposed strategy was to lean in to my NLP skills and get software help to find interesting ideas, rhymes, etc. Sort of auto poem creation with human tweaking.

[mechanicum]

There’s a guy on London’s South Bank calls himself the “poetry busker”. Types them up on a vintage Remington, wears a top hat. Been there for years.

Right location and nobody will blink.

[12ian34]

never noticed this guy before - could you provide a more exact location?

[filoleg]

I would totally be willing to pay $20-30 for this, and not in a sense of "object of ridicule". And I would be willing to pay for this on more than one occasion, even.

The service you would be providing has been, in a way, so normalized over the past 5+ years in the digital form (people doing poems/paintings/various other art-related things on commission on public streams; entire successful companies built around a similar premise, just look at Cameo), that your proposition starts sounding more and more "normal" as the time goes.

And I don't care if the poetry is not good, as you claim you have no skills. Authenticity is what matters here. And you are being absolutely self-aware about your skills, which only adds to authenticity. Especially given the more minimalistic/industrial/lo-fi (not related to "lo-fi hiphop" type of stuff) direction that popular art has been moving in for the past few years.

Plus, I am willing to bet that after you do it for a month, even if you did it only for a few days each week, your poetry writing skill would shoot up massively. You use software to assist you? Even cooler, as long as there is still a significant human element in the process, and it ain't just some publicly available software doing 100% of the work for you (because at this point, I could use it myself; there is a reason people pay for concerts instead of listening to perfectly recorded and mastered music replayed on speakers at concert venues).

I will say this, though. Given it is a physical version of that successful digital approach i've mentioned, you got additional pros and cons. The pro is that the physical element makes it feel more "real", thus people are willing to pay more and more often. The con is that your success and viability, at least at first, will very very heavily depend on the location of choice where you are thinking of doing that.

[pmoriarty]

You might get some takers if you did it in a college town, but as you probably know poetry is not exactly the hottest selling genre of literature... and finding people that read at all is hard enough.

You'd probably have a much easier time offering to write dirty jokes.. or juggling.

What people want on the streets is a spectacle... the louder and more garish the better.

[Jun8]

I hear you; however, one rarely gets a literary piece, let alone poetry, created specifically for them. To His Coy Mistress may sound formulaic and drab, but what if you are Mary Villiers, who Marvell was tutoring at the time and probably addressed in the poem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Villiers,_Duchess_of_Buck...)? You probably would view it differently.

[pmoriarty]

Give it a try, and please report back. It'll be interesting to hear what your experience is.

[cosmicglee]

This is a sadly accurate comment. Please pass the hemlock.

[david422]

> They would either buy or not buy the poem

Why not just allow them to set their price?

[silicon2401]

I wouldn't pay for it because I don't like most modern poetry or poets and calligraphy's not worth much to me unless the words it captures are worth it. Maybe if you did calligraphy requests.

However one should be adventurous, especially where there's so little to lose. The subject of the OP is easy to ridicule because he looks conventionally nerdy/dweeby and has a flipping typewriter at a park. Just dress normally and be friendly and you'll just be a street artist doing calligraphy instead of caricatures, nothing to laugh at

[scoot]

Or... you could read the linked article? It seems that you've completely missed what was being ridiculed, and why.

[Jun8]

I did (I thought my subtle reference of dodging the bullet to a comment to the piece his ex wrote was clever ;-), I was just going on tangentially about an idea similar to the one that he had, which, in retrospect, is more ridicule-worthy.

[scoot]

> an idea similar to the one that he had, which, in retrospect, is more ridicule-worthy

Like I said, that isn't what was being ridiculed, nor why.

What was being ridiculed was a photo of him in the park with his typewriter, because the image was posted without context. Your story is in no way comparable, because in your case it's the idea of writing poetry that your girlfriend found derisible, not the idea of you sitting on a bench with pen and paper in hand.